Archive for November 2011

“The History of Joakim Soria” is back with another one of the cards from the bland years of Topps. In the late 1990s and early 2000s it seemed Topps was in a bit of a rut. They weren’t cranking out bad designs, just a little bland and not very unique. You can see on this 1998 card the addition of transparent borders to try to liven the card up, what it does is make it busy and distracts from the picture, something I feel you never want to do. The name block has the team’s logo repeated several times in the background, another thing to make the card just look busy. I do like how the actual name of the player runs into the solid box possessing the team’s name though. My last comment; another solid gold border; yuck. Overall, not a good design by Topps.

Most of my re-creations of Topps cards are portrait cards. This one is a landscape card for a couple reasons: I want to represent certain years that did have sideways cards, not all of them did, I don’t think any base cards were sideways from 1972 – 1990. The second reason is some designs look nice in a landscape format. The last reason is simply I have pictures that won’t fit “up and down” on a card like this one.

The Melky Cabrera trade was a good deal for the Royals. They had Lorenzo Cain ready and no place to put him and a desperate need for starting pitching. They got their pitcher but I am going to focus on how it will effect the Royals lineup. It is interesting how well this worked out for the Royals. I think Melky Cabrera had a career year last year. I’m not going to say it won’t happen again but I feel it is unlikely. Lorenzo Cain will replace Melky Cabrera but it will effect the lineup.

Melky Cabrera batted second basically all of 2011. Cain will not bat second in 2012. He will likely end up near the bottom of the lineup at number 7. This will be a good low pressure spot for him to get established in the major leagues. The move of Cain down will shift Johnny Giavotella up the second hole. This is where the Royals second baseman had batted in the minor leagues and he could be an excellent number two hitter. Cain could shift to the top of the lineup but it is unlikely will all of his strikeouts. If he cuts down on them he could be a candidate to be a leadoff hitter. This would allow Alex Gordon to move to the number two hole where I feel he would be most valuable for the Royals but it is unlikely.

So Melky Cabrera is gone. The Royals sent him to the coast for left handed pitchers Jonathan Sanchez (right) and Ryan Verdugo. It looks like a good trade from my perspective. Sure Melky had a monster year last year batting .305 with 18 HR and 87 RBI including 201 base hits, but lets face it, that looks like a career year. He was only under contract for one more season so its not like he was part of the long-term future of the team. He was a candidate to re-sign but with Lorenzo Cain and Wil Myers coming up fast in the Royals organization he was far from expendable.

Now Jonathan Sanchez is similar in the fact that he will soon be a free agent. Sanchez is a high strikeout/high walk guy that is sure to eat up a lot of innings. Who knows if he will be a candidate to re-sign or not but the fact is that with the addition of him it shows the Royals are going to try to win in 2012. Will They? Maybe not but at least they aren’t afraid to go for it at this point. They are closer than any season since about 1993 in my opinion to being a contender. Plus they got another left handed arm to add to a deep arsenal in Ryan Verdugo. Sanchez will help the rotation in 2012 under any circumstance unless he gets injured.

The most important thing about the trade may be what the Royals gave up. Did they give up a prospect? No. Did they give up a potential building block of the organization? No. They gave up a guy that we basically got for free on the free agent market last off-season. It was one of the best signings of that off-season but the team had little invested in him. This was a great trade for the Kansas City Royals.

I’ll just throw it out there right away; I think I nailed this one. It’s odd that the look of certain years of cards are hard to pin down but I got 1964 Topps here. As always it is pretty much always about the picture. I wanted a good high quality head shot of Soria and to crop it tight. I found a nice picture with a bit of a scowl on his face. I know this is a very basic design but I still think it is one of the better re-creations that I have done. I might have to throw in a few Custom Card of the Day’s in the 1964 format since I like it so much and see if it translates well with other teams.

The design of 1964 is very simple and plain. The one distinct thing about it is that the players head breaks the border of the top of the picture. This helps give the card just enough life to keep it from being boring. In 1964 there were obviously no Royals cards so what I usually do is take a Dodgers card to get my color pallet. The Dodgers have been around forever and they have a similar color pallet as the Royals would have had.